thoughts on thoughts

Only Awareness Remains

Life moves, undulates, breathes in and out, contracting and expanding. This is its nature, the nature of what is. Whatever is, is on the move. Nothing remains the same for very long. The mind wants everything to stop so that it can get its foothold, find its position, so it can figure out how to control life. Through the pursuit of material things, knowledge, ideas, beliefs, opinions, emotional states, spiritual states, and relationships, the mind seeks to find a secure position from which to operate.

The mind seeks to nail life down and get it to stop moving and changing. When this doesn’t work, the mind begins to seek the changeless, the eternal, something that doesn’t move. But the mind of thought is itself an expression of life’s movement and so must always be in movement itself. When there is thought, that thought is always moving and changing. There is really no such thing as thought. There is only thinking, so thought which is always moving (as thinking) cannot apprehend the changeless.

When thought enters into the changeless it goes silent. When thought goes silent, the thinker, the psychological “me,” the image-produced self, disappears. Suddenly it is gone. You, as an idea, are gone. Awareness remains alone. There is no one who is aware. Awareness itself is itself. You are now no longer the thought, nor the thinker, nor someone who is aware. Only awareness remains, as itself. Then, within awareness, thought moves. Within the changeless, change happens.

Now awareness expresses itself. Awareness is always expressing itself: as life, as change, as thought, feelings, bodies, humans, plants, trees, cars, etc. Awareness yields to itself, to its inherent creativity, to its expression in form, to experience itself. The changeless is changing. The eternal is living and dying. The formless is form. The form is formless. This is nothing the mind could have ever imagined

– Adayashanti

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My mind is often searching for some footing, something to anchor to so that it may try and “control” life. I know that when I am trying to control life that is when discomfort shows up, usually as anxiety. I have been at war with my mind for a number of years now. Maybe it is time to surrender and simply be aware of life expressing itself through thinking. According to the poem above – when the thinker (me) is silent, I disappear. Why am I always trying to disappear…

What would happen if I allowed my mind to wander and think into all the dark corners. What if I stopped resisting?